Thank You, White People!

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream. […]

Thank you for kidnapping and/or buying my ancestors in Africa, packing them onto ships where malnutrition, disease, anti-hygenic conditions, beatings, and rape ensured that a significant percentage did not survive the trip, but enough did for you to turn a profit.

Thank you for enslaving my ancestors, forcing them to labor in the fields and in your houses for no pay (room and board is certainly enough!), in poor living conditions, without education, without their families, in many cases, and without hope that their lives would ever get better.

Thank you for raping and beating my ancestors, I appreciate it. Thanks also for forcing them to “breed” as if they were animals, selecting out certain men and women for their strength, hoping that their children would be strong, too, and be able to pick more cotton or engage in other work you couldn’t be bothered to do yourself.

I actually saw Buchannan say that crap on the McLaughlin Group – puttin’ the “laugh” in McLaughlin, cuz I cracked up. “Is this dude serious?”

Well, of course he is. And I don’t mean to trivialize the depth to which this stupid take on race relations is commonly held among my “fellow whites” – I grew up hearing it, and when I wasn’t sputtering in disbelief at the arrogance (it sounded a bit like, “But! Buh! Wha? Fu-?”), I was shaking my head at the ignorance.

MSNBC will be having a “conversation on race” pretty soon. Given that Pat is a frequent guest on MSNBC political shows, should we expect to hear his “perspective”?

Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

This is the third time I’ve seen a post on this subject (Pandagon, ABW, here) and it’s only now that the second layer of stupidity in this statement finally hit me. Apart from the obvious, the programs Buchanan lists are neither charity nor gifts. They are attempts to right wrongs*. One might thank another person for a present or an act of charity, but thanking them for no longer being as bad of oppressors as in the past is almost an insult. As if they can not be expected to act in disinterested justice but will only do the right thing if they might get something out of it (i.e. thanks.) In the end, Buchanan is insulting whites as well as blacks.

*Of course, none of these programs benefits blacks exclusively. I can be called black only by very strict adherence to the “one drop” rule, but I could never have gotten through college and med school without student loans and grants, to give an example. Indeed, student loans almost certainly benefit whites and pseudo-whites more often than blacks. Which makes asking blacks to thank whites for GSLs yet more stupid: poor blacks who are never going to college because their primary education doesn’t prepare them adequately pay taxes, middle class white kids get loans backed by the government to cover higher education costs…who should be thanking whom for this?

He’s just a bigot with a big mouth and it gets him a lot of attention. And for some people, negative attention is better than none at all. And he does have his supporters.

If ignorance is a means to express racial bigotry and hatred and/or class bigotry or hatred, why not? It’s not like this arrows not been used before by him and other people of his ilk. And even people not of his ilk.

Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Huh? Since when has it been only African-Americans who utilize these resources and since when were these services designed as was the trillions allegedly allocated to only be provided for African-Americans? So they’re to blame because the services that are utilized by a lot of people of different ethnicities and races have failed to bring them into the mainstream?

One thing to keep in mind with the wingnuts: every time they talk about “trillions” spent on “welfare”: they’re including Social Security. Social Security is, after all, an anti-poverty program.

I mention this not because I figure anyone reading here needs to understand this to realize Buchanan’s full of crap, but I do think that a lot of other people would be shocked to realize that he’s including the check that every single worker gets after age 65 in his calculations.

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